One woman has shared a warning online after one unassuming habit landed her in hospital.

One woman has shared a warning online after her unassuming habit landed her in hospital.

A TikToker named Bre posted a video from a hospital bed with her hand heavily bandaged captioning it, “your sign to stop biting your nails”.

The digital creator shared that she “had a small cut on [her] finger from picking at [her] cuticle”. Not long after “bacteria got in and caused [her] finger to swell”.

Watch the video above.

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She sought medical advice for her swollen finger and ended up requiring a “minor surgery to wash out the bacteria”.

She later joked that she thankfully still has all her fingers.

Several TikTok users revealed that they also have a habit of biting their nails and were shocked by Bre’s medical predicament.

“I was biting my nails when I saw this,” one person commented.

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”Remind me every minute,” commented another.

“I had a cut in my cuticle recently (not from biting my nails) and I’m glad this didn’t happen to me,” another wrote.

Bre’s experience is surprising and dermatologist Dr Deshan Sebaratnam tells 9honey that ending up in a scenario like this is “very rare”, but that’s not to say there aren’t any health risks associated with nail biting.

“Your nail slate, or what we call the nail, is dead, it’s just like your hair, you can’t really damage that. But the risk is when you’re biting your nail you can perhaps bite some of the surrounding skin or if you bite a nail in such a way that the nail is like jagged then it can damage the skin and then that can lead to germs getting inside, Dr Sebaratnam says.

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Dr Sebaratnam says its pretty rare for something like this to happen but what could be more common is nail biting “causing a form of dermatitis”.

“So dermatitis or eczema is when you get inflammation in the top layer of the skin so if you’re biting your nails in your mouth saliva can cause damage to the proteins in your skin and then with that you can get some irritation and then you can get inflammation in the nail,” he says.

Overall Dr Sebaratnam says the habit is in general “pretty safe” but “nothing in the world is harmless” and as a habit that can come with risks, he would advise against it.

But for many it’s a habit that they’ve had for years, so how can they break it?

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Dr Sebaratnam acknowledges that “its very hard to break a habit” but says there are “simple things that you can do” to help.

These include putting vaseline or “unpleasant tasting” ointments on your nails to prevent you from nail biting.

One TikTok user also shared her tip for curbing the habit on Bre’s video.

“I started getting my nails done to help me with my nail biting habit,” she wrote.

“Whether press ons or going to a salon, it worked.”

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